#not a single lesbian law to shield me from the most charming and interesting girl being able to get to me from across the goddamn globe

[gilliandersons]

i respect each and every single one of you that shoot your shot, my immediate desire after realising i have a crush on this girl is to block her

[c-is-for-circinate]

do you have a favorite god to get boons from in hades? (mines is dionysus, he always manages to give me good boons like the bestie he is)

Dionysus is a super chill bro and I support you :)  He is a ton of fun to run into, and status effects are always clutch.  Some of his higher-level boons are awesome, too.  (Looking at you, Dionysus/Zeus duo boon that can just wipe out whole swathes of the field with a Festive Fog lightning storm.)  Also, he recently proposed we prank Orpheus together, and I died laughing.  (My friend​, who is not playing the game but is hearing me ramble about it A LOT on discord, looked up Zagreus on Wikipedia where I dare not yet tread for fear of spoilers several days ago, and they mentioned the whole “sometimes mythical Zagreus is conflated with Dionysus!  Have you met Dionysus yet?  Are you SURE you’re not also Dionysus?” a few times before that happened.  I am so proud of my booze bro for making that happen.)

Honorable mention also goes to Aphrodite, who comes with some really great status effects (I think she might have my favorite Aid, and that Aphrodite/Zeus duo boon that charges it up super fast makes it incredibly useful, just a constant spam of charm spells) and really fun interactions.  She was never my favorite Olympian as a kid (yes, of course I was a Greek myth kid, what do you take me for), but I appreciate how much she is exactly what she appears to be in this game, you know?  She’s a little shallow but she’s not ashamed of herself for it.  She’s free with affection and happy to share.  We all know she’s the kind of lady who loves watching some drama go down, and she is not above starting some shit, but she’s not actually making any pretenses about that and I appreciate that on her.  I legit believe she’s trying to help me get out of Hades because she thinks it’s just awful that anybody who counts as a real person should be stuck down there in that dark awful place (mortals don’t count as real people but, y’know, it’s the Greek gods, that’s sort of a given).  And, ok, maybe I have a little extra affection for any version of Aphrodite who’s not just “ooh, she’s a slutty mean shallow girl who likes to manipulate everybody to stroke her own ego, we’re so ~edgy~ for thinking she’s awful”.  They did a good job making an Aphrodite I can support, and I am glad for that.

Poseidon probably has the boons with my favorite effects (tidal dash is great and I love it), and Zeus, Athena, and Ares all have specific boons that I really enjoy in certain circumstances.  Favorite character, though, hands down, is ABSOLUTELY Artemis.

Some of this is definitely pre-existing bias--I was always somewhere between Artemis and Athena for favorite deity back during my time as a Greek myth kid, although I like her way more than Athena here.  Most of it is just that the way she’s written is so great.  She’s awkward!  She leaves me awkward voicemails because she doesn’t know what to say!  She’s not super comfortable around all of her loud, competitive, extroverted relatives with all their enormous personalities and equally enormous egos.  She is so obviously the sort of person who doesn’t entirely know what to do with herself when she doesn’t have a job to do, and, really, the world just makes so much more sense when she’s out in the woods on a hunt by herself taking things seriously and getting her work done.  She is explicitly hanging out with her family right now for the express purpose of working together to save me, and you can hear in her voice how it’s making her a little tense having them around all the time but she’s doing it anyway because this is important.  Her duo boon dialogue with Zeus!  Dad acting all indulgent about his odd daughter who won’t do the sensible thing and take a husband or at least a lover, for Olympus’s sake, and Artemis who is like, ‘really, you really don’t get why I would rather be out in the woods than committing myself to dealing with the sort of guys we have around our family’.  (The mention of preferring to be alone or with her nymph friends has big ace/lesbian crossover energy, and as a vaguely-aceish vaguely-lesbianish queer lady I am all about it.)  And yet she still invites us to come hunt with her once we get out of the Underworld up to Olympus.  Her safe alone space, away from her overwhelming family, and she’s willing to welcome Zagreus into it after she helps him get away from his family. 

The tricky thing about Artemis is that nearly all of her boons are crit-related, which officially makes them the boon set I am usually least interested in.  Part of this is absolutely math fallacies because math brain works very very hard at my actual job and does not want to come out and play during video game time, so it rebels against actually sitting down and calculating what percentage crit rate might do more good with my particular playstyle with various weapons than simply a flat damage increase from another boon.  Part of it’s the fact that I can see the impact of other boons, but not the increased critrate (because everything is always going much too fast to notice a single individual crit when it happens).  Part of it’s just how I tend to react to buffs and builds: law of large numbers aside, a flat bonus/effect applied to every single hit is always going to be more consistent and reliable than the crapshoot of a crit chance, and coming from a turn-based combat background, consistent and reliable is still a (possibly undeserving) priority to my game-strategy brain.

On the other hand, Artemis also has one of my favorite boons in the entire game in Support Fire--you know, the boon that fires off a bonus target-seeking arrow every single time you hit an enemy with your weapon in any way, or cast, even if you don’t hit anything.  It’s pretty good with sword/shield/spear.  It’s great with the fists, where you’re going to be multi-hitting anyway, and absolutely essential with the railgun if you’re me and can barely use the railgun.  Exit Wounds, where enemies take damage when they drop the cast, is also really great.  Both of those are boons with prereqs, so I’ll often hope for an Artemis boon early in the game (usually her cast boon or that boon that gives you a low crit chance on all damage, because that one doesn’t preclude putting other specific strike/flourish/dash boons on) to try and set myself up to get them later.  It tends to work pretty well, plus then I get to hang out with Artemis more, and that is always a winner.

(Yep, I sure did write a six-paragraph response to a two-line ask.  For everyone who’s followed me in the past couple of weeks--you MUST be aware by now that this is how I do.  You MUST have figured out what you signed up for.  I am not sorry.  (I’m a little sorry.))